Mailpiece address blocks that have been struck through need to have that fact identified so that processing can take the strike through into account. Traditional connected region analysis approaches have difficulties in assessing the strike through of the address blocks due to connectedness variability and shape variability.
By way of explanation, an address block with strike through has two major effects on mailpiece processing. First, depending on higher contexts, it almost certainly means that the given block should not be used as the destination for the mailpiece. Second, any information gleaned from the address block may be suspect as having a strike through often confuses the optical character recognition (OCR) process because of the way it “connects” characters from multiple lines. Either of these effects are sufficient to want to determine that a strike through is present.
As one example, the processes that are used to find address blocks use connected region analysis. In connected region analysis, sets of touching black pixels are grouped together into characters. A strike through, though, confuses the connected region analysis and damages the character isolation process. To compensate for this deficiency, a pixel based examination of the suspect groups is needed to detect the strike through in the address block, which is not an efficient use of processing.